A Lover’s Quarrel

by: Art Rosch

Companions at odds amid the complications of the Information Age…..

Internet and I were at a Starbucks and it was one of those weekdays at two o’clock when the place was quiet. There were a few people about, softly chatting at nearby tables. One young man, about seventeen or eighteen, typed quietly on his laptop. Internet was in my Toshiba Satellite smartphone, and I pulled her closer so we could converse through the camera and microphone.

“We need to talk,” I said.

Those dreadful words, ‘We need to talk,’ mocked Internet. But it’s true. Things have been changing between us.

Her voice was tinny, coming from those little speakers at the bottom of my phone, but it didn’t matter.

Internet put a face on the screen. It was one of those video game Lara Croft-type faces. I knew she was teasing me, but it revealed her anxiety.

“Cut it out,” I said. “Use your real face…the one we agreed on.”

Internet changed to a convincing human visage. She had red-brown hair and freckles and looked like a student at Cambridge or Oxford. I’ve always been a sucker for smart English girls. Internet was still teasing, though. She was wearing round Harry Potter glasses. She was trying to be funny, but they looked good on her and she didn’t know it.

We both started speaking at precisely the same moment.

“Well…I, uh…”

“You go first,” Internet said, in her upper crust English accent.

“We’ve been together a long time,” I said. “Ever since my first Mac Notebook.”

Internet appeared to shudder and for a moment there was a screen with little green battleships scooting back and forth. Then she regained her “face.”

“It’s me,” she said. “Not you. I’m the one who’s changed.”

“We’ve both changed, and it’s good. It’s great!” I said, “But something has gone away, something has been lost.”

“What? What? There’s nothing lost. My god! Look what I can do now, look at the size of the files you can upload into me. And, ….well…I can download into you…” Her shoulders wiggled with a sensual shimmy. “I love it!”

“That part of our relationship has been better than ever,” I said. “Our…uh…connection speed has been fabulous. It’s uh…uh…”

“What? It’s what?” She was getting impatient.

“This is hard to say,” I waffled.

“Just come out with it!”

“Okay, okay. I think you’ve become all about money.”

“Oh bullshit!” Internet bellowed as its face turned a shade more red. Her complexion was already rosy, but I knew I had hit a nerve. “I make money, you make money, everybody makes money on the Internet. What are you complaining about! Come on, tell me the truth.”

“It’s true, but I feel like you’ve moved into my apartment and now the place is full of those sticky cobwebs that you walk through and then you keep brushing your head to get the stuff off but it never comes off. I don’t know what’s going on any more.”

My hand trembled as I drank a swig of lukewarm cappuccino. It was all closing in on me; I felt confused and embarrassed. There was a silence. Internet looked guilty.

I don’t know why I blurted out the next words. I had promised myself not to act jealous.

“It’s Google, isn’t it?”

Internet looked even more guilty. “What do you mean, ‘It’s Google?”

My mind was beginning to clear. The cobwebby feeling started falling away from me. “You’ve sold out to Google. Everything is owned and run by Google and the like. There aren’t websites any more. There are web colonies that are being run by web empires. Everything I post shows up on a hundred other websites. I can’t scratch my nuts without a link appearing on Facebook, Rotten Tomatoes or Twitter: Art Rosch just scratched his nuts. Do you want to be his Friend?”

Internet’s face dissolved into chaos, then put itself back together. Maybe the connection went down. Maybe Internet was laughing. There was a shadowy figure of Winston Churchill on Internet’s forehead. Down by her chin was the monster from “Alien” but it was shrinking, quickly disappearing.

“Okay, I have to come clean, get this stuff off my chest,” she said. “I’ve been bought up by a handful of corporations. Tell you the truth, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t have a clue. I’m getting new software thrown at me so fast, I can’t handle it.” A tear slid down her cheek. “I’m crashing all the time!”

I barely heard her. I was reflecting on the experiences of the last few weeks.

“Tell me about it,” I said, at last. “It seems like every day I’m asked to join another social network. What the hell is Pinterp? Or Floosbock? Like an idiot, I join them and what these sites do for me is a complete mystery. All I want to do is write books and promote them. But everyone’s got a book! My inbox is ninety percent book promos. What do I have to write to get people’s attention? Seems like it’s all Harlequin Romance Vampire Private Detectives With Occult Powers. Good God!

There are fifty-million writers trying to sell their first novel. If you can’t get an agent, that’s okay, E-Publish your book and let Amazon sell it! And that works out great, you sell maybe ten copies and the book sinks into the abyss of forgotten novels.”

“Calm down,” Internet said. “Things will work out. We’ll get through this glitch. I’ll help you promote your books.”

Internet titled her head and her gaze downward for a moment and then she looked up at me with her head still lowered. It was a very cute look. Very seductive.

I moused over to the UPLOAD button and clicked. My new draft was a blue bar that creeped horizontally across a rectangular box. Percentage figures rode along the bottom. It took about a minute. Internet’s face was rapt. Her mouth was half open and her eyes glistened. The blue bar reached the end of the box and the new draft appeared on the screen.

“OH!” Internet sighed. “OH! OH! You’re right. This is a much better book. I know it’s awful to be a writer. It even more awful to be really great and still get ignored. I know it breaks your heart.”

I didn’t say anything. I thought about all the toil, all the years I spent working on the craft of writing. “Yes,” I said at last. “It breaks my heart.”

Internet was recovering her composure. She had read the new draft and I knew she was proud of me.

“Don’t ever give up writing,” she said. “Never. You must keep writing. This is amazing stuff. There is nothing else like it.”

I opened the webpage on my book blog and filled my monitor screen with the cover. I looked at my design. I looked at the starry cosmos and the elongated objects that resembled fiery colliding worlds. It was a work in progress but it wasn’t kitsch, it was faithful to the spirit of the book. It was a really cool cover.

“Don’t worry, babe. I can’t quit writing. I’m not capable of quitting writing, no matter how much it breaks my heart. To paraphrase an old motto, ‘You’ll have to pry my keyboard from my cold dead fingers.'”

“That’s my man,” Internet said. “I know I’ll go on changing, but great art is timeless. I’ll be loyal to you, I promise.”

I couldn’t quite make myself trust the promise. It made me sad. But it left room for hope.